Liberal Bad, Conservative Good

The reason democracies work is that they are found in liberal societies. In liberal societies populations are educated and there is freedom of information. In liberal societies people are free to express diverse opinions. Liberal societies exhibit diversity in lifestyle choice among the inhabitants.

The main tenant of the Bush doctrine is to force democratic government onto societies that have not undergone modernization and where societies are illiberal. These countries then become our allies. These are places where societies are not secular. These are places where there is not freedom of information. These are places where literacy is limited to the upper classes. Democracy, introduced into illiberal societies does not produce governments sympathetic to Western ideals. Domestically, the Bush doctrine seeks to create a more illiberal society in America. It is no wonder that other industrialized Western democracies increasingly view America as if it was a third World banana republic on steroids.

It would be naive to think American leadership doesn't understand this. While virtually all other modern industrialized countries are improving their educational systems and encouraging their populations to broaden understanding of the World around them, the United States has been moving backward. Educational levels and literacy are actually decreasing in America and have been for decades. Real information is not readily available. The population is becoming more insular, xenophobic and dependent on primitive religious superstition than was true half a century ago. The government used to censor sensitive military information during times of war. Currently, the government routinely censors huge amounts of information relating to virtually every area of its operation. The censorship of war news has reached ridiculous levels. It's like they are using Orwell's 1984 as a blueprint. This was the hallmark of the Stalinist Soviet empire. There is no reason for this other than to encourage ignorance and passivity among the general population. This is not some kind of conspiracy theory. It's just true.

In an illiberal democracy, where the people have neither the tools nor the information to make informed decisions, electoral outcomes and public opinion can be manipulated by the information the people are allowed access to. One only has to look at the effort the government goes to in discrediting the intellectual class and institutions of learning in this country, that disseminate real information indiscriminately, to see where our democracy is headed.